The Syntactic Pasts of Nouns Shape Their Prosodic Future: Lexico-Syntactic Effects on Position and Duration

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Phonetics
• Psycholinguistics

Background:

• Phrasal prosody traditionally views phonetic variations as independent of lexical content.
• Word duration can be affected by prosodic position, syntactic context, and lexical factors.
• Emerging evidence suggests lexico-syntactic information influences phonetic duration in speech production.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the interaction between lexico-syntactic effects and prosodic positioning on phonetic duration.
• To determine if lexico-syntactic information influences a word's prosodic position.
• To examine if lexico-syntactic factors modulate duration within specific prosodic positions.

Main Methods:

• Utilized the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English for analysis.
• Operationalized syntactic information using noun diversity and typicality from a dependency parse of the British National Corpus.
• Analyzed phonetic duration and prosodic phrase positioning.

Main Results:

• Words with higher syntactic diversity are generally found in earlier positions within prosodic phrases.
• Lexico-syntactic diversity and typicality significantly modulate word duration, particularly in nonfinal phrase positions.
• Evidence supports an early influence of lexico-syntactic factors on prosodic planning.

Conclusions:

• Lexico-syntactic properties play a role in determining prosodic phrase structure and word duration.
• Prosodic planning is influenced by lexico-syntactic considerations early in speech production.
• The findings challenge the view of prosodic variations being entirely independent of lexical and syntactic information.